Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Strangeness Of Inner Truth is the eighteenth chapter in my book, Amazing: Truths About Conscious Awareness. Each chapter is designed as a standalone set of ideas, independent, but melding in with the others.

Strangeness of Inner Truth

Our inner spaces are peppered with strangeness. We invent like mad scientists to plug holes with acceptable excuses for insight.

Comfortable enough realities latch on with security for an adhesive. Security nurtured evolutionary change. Going forward where security is less certain demands uncommon courage. Everyone has some courage, but we will also need a stronger commitment to risk than we’ve had before.

But think about this: we’re already going into those scary places, like it or not. We have no choice but to enter them when we sleep. Even if we can avoid the strangeness everywhere else, in sleep we seep into realms of awareness so odd we can’t accurately remember most of it.

Some dose themselves every day to resist being awake in sleep. An endless continent of unknowns is what we’re crossing. We keep our eyes closed and whistle in the dark, which really is not the same as never going there.

That familiar thing we call “reality” is just something we built out, scraping it together from the materials and tools we had. It’s surprising how radically it changes without being noticed, plunging to invisible depths and nudging the membranes of external dimensions.

Reality’s functional, not real. In the end, if we ever see one, it may turn out that nothing is as firm and changeless as the real world.

Awareness evolved, made strong by its power to help us believe we’d tamed chaos. All ultimate realities are quantum, more bizarre than the nice world we navigate, and it’s likely even odder mechanics lay beneath. We never evolved senses that let us go so deep, but ignoring a thing doesn’t cause it to go away. It may make it more formidable.

Macro creation is a wonderful place in which to bop around, flavored with Walt Disney Worlds and soaring mountain peaks, but we can only claim that God created it if awareness is God. If awareness is God, then we need to kick out all those inconsistent claimants to the title.

Here is an equation that makes sense: God equals awareness. We are free to celebrate the simplicity. Then, we need to encourage God to flourish.

Factors that persist in reality are ones that enhance or secure survival without elevating risk. If not, the thing itself will be discarded like a humanoid’s tail. Everything’s connected.

Nothing exists in isolation, and success is assured only through usefulness.

So, why would nature shape a sack of molecules into the complex gobs of matter we call men and women and reward them for curiosity and exploration? Sure, those qualities protected us from other hungry creations, sabertooth tigers, for example, but we surpassed those threats long ago without any ebb in curiosity.

Some keep looking beyond to places where there are no threats, only mysteries and wonder, passionate about it as if turned on by discovery.

Some inter-cranial gymnastics are taking place that we aren’t sure will lead to reasonable conclusions.

Our consciousness must once have been primally embedded in the wholeness of whatever universe banged or whooshed out fourteen and a half billion years ago. We departed for places unknown in a jiffy.

Eventually, we deviated into logical, three-dimensional realities that are accessible and secure. We now know that these realities are partial. We’re hobbled by all we don’t know. It’s not a surprise, and it doesn’t really matter what we say. Our universe can’t be the universe. There’s more, and we know it.

But why should we care, really? We’re doing fine with the fraction we do know.

As one species among many that share roots and interests, we’re romantics who just can’t get over our first love. We want to get the thrill back.

Our first love was God, a wholeness, and the tool we’re using in our search is awareness. We can’t afford to be afraid of knowing. Like that aching young romantic, we need to move ahead. Any Dutch uncle worth the title would put his arm over our shoulders and gently advise us to let what Ralph Waldo Emerson called “half-gods” go.

We can’t have back what we once had. We can’t reassemble a past that in which we never took a full inventory. It’s over, but as we grow up, we can do better. Emerson’s gods may arrive.

We already know so much. We know that there is more out there than we see, touch, taste, feel and hear, which is an enormous insight, and we know that part of the reason we don’t get all of it is that we don’t know what to look for. We’re just beginning to recognize the clues. It’s like being engaged in the search for lost valuables, our only information about them being that they’re worth something.

But here’s the thing. If you accept the fact of intuition, of information coming to us from “out of nowhere,” an experience we’ve all had, then you already know that, as Conan Doyle concluded, someone somewhere is trying to help.

We’re not stranded and clueless, and maybe we’re not well informed because we’re just not ready or willing to know. Remember how young we are. It’s true that Rome wasn’t built in a day, and equally so that no tourist ever discovered all of it on a summer vacation.

Strangeness Of Inner Truth is the eighteenth chapter in my book, Amazing: Truths About Conscious Awareness. Each chapter is designed as a standalone set of ideas, independent, but melding in with the others.

I finished my first novel when I was twenty and kept going. These days, I write a lot online on many subjects. I sell freelance journalism and have six books done and in the market, two of them the kind of novels I always wanted to write, the rest full of surprises.